Book of the Day: the first of a mid-century author's best-selling sea yarns

Howard Pease, The Tattooed Man: A Tale of Strange Adventures Befalling Tod Moran, Mess Boy of the Tramp Steamer ‘Araby,’ Upon His First Voyage from San Francisco to Genoa, via the Panama Canal (Doubleday, Page & Co, 1926), 1st ed, The Sun Dial Press, Young Moderns Book Shelf.  332 pp, hardcover, no dust jacket, blue cloth boards w/red spine titling/detailing, very good condition. Color frontispiece illustration with five b&w illustrations in the text. 8”x 5”.  First of a thirteen book, 35-year series remembered to this day. HBB price: $20.

The Tattooed Man is a tale of a strange adventure which befalls seventeen-year-old Tod Moran. Pease wanted his character, Tod Moran, to be "the average boy-not too good, not too bad; not too cowardly, but not brave either.”

He sent Tod to sea on a dirty tramp steamer looking for his lost brother. It was a world for which young Tod was unprepared, a world where he had to take a place not as a boy, but as a man. Tod's trip and the characters he met were based on Pease's own first sea voyage. The book also uses materials that Pease gathered from his walking trip after the Armistice, from Marseilles to the Italian border. Although the subject is life on a sea freighter, the theme is about growing up.

The names and personalities of his fictional characters were often based on people he knew. He chose the name "Moran" for his character from the Moran family that had lived across the street from his Stockton boyhood home. "Tod" came from Tad Clowdesley, whose father, William, was the librarian in Stockton for years. The tattooed cook, Captain Jarvis, Toppy, and Swede were conglomerates of real characters that he met on his sea voyage. The seamen characters were to become regular characters in his Tod Moran stories.

The Sun Dial Press was a Doubleday compact reprint label launched in 1923 to compete with Random House’s Modern Library. The books were designed by W.A. Dwiggins, a leading designer of the day, and priced at $1. 

Pease at Stanford, 1916

When we pick up old books- almost always minus their dust jackets- they are practically mute. They are like potsherds found in the backyard: pre-Columbian, or Lowe’s Garden Department? It's hard to tell much about them.

Part of the value rare and collectible book dealers add to their wares is helping old, forgotten authors find new audiences.  And that, today, brings me to Howard Pease (1894-1974).

Pease was one of the most successful American authors of tales for boys for some thirty years. In a 75th birthday speech, writer Philip Roth recalled himself at ten, “I was at the time reading the sea stories of Howard Pease, the Joseph Conrad of boys’ books, whose titles included Wind in the Rigging, The Black Tanker, Secret Cargo, and Shanghai Passage. As soon as I’d mastered the Underwood’s keyboard and the digital gymnastics of the touch system of typing, I inserted a clean sheet of white paper into the typewriter and tapped out in caps at its exact center a first title of my own: Storm Off Hatteras. Beneath that title I didn’t type my name, however. I was well aware that Philip Roth wasn’t a writer’s name. I typed instead “by Eric Duncan.” That was the name I chose as befitting the seafaring author of Storm Off Hatteras, a tale of wild weather and a tyrannical captain and mutinous intrigue in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. There’s little that can bestow more confidence and lend more authority than a name with two hard consonants.”

The son of a creamery deliveryman in Stockton, California, Clarence Howard Pease grew up over the store with his parents and two siblings. Stockton was a river town and Pease followed the coming and going of shipping, and taking overnight steamers to San Francisco to hang out.

Graduating high school, Pease worked various jobs to save money for college and entered Stanford as a history major in 1915. In 1916 he volunteered for a university ambulance detachment to go to France; when the war was declared in 1917 he was automatically enlisted in the Army, traveling by ship from San Francisco through the Canal to New York and Europe. He doubled as a crew member, working everywhere from the officers’ mess to the engine room. 

Mustered out of the Army in 1919, Pease returned to Stanford but dropped out again in 1921 to care for his dying father and ill-skilled mother. He stuck to his increasingly chimerical vision of becoming a writer, secretly renting an office in Stockton where he could write without interruption while trying to grapple with reams of background material for adventure stories but no idea for a plot.

Pease finally came up with both and sold a story to American Boy magazine for $80. He bought a box he reckoned was big enough two hundred rejection slips, and determined he’d write for ten years or until the box was full.

With his occasional writing income, Pease returned to Stanford, retooling himself as an education major in history. In 1922-23 he completed his first novel. At 28, Pease finally got his degree and embarked on a teaching career in Bay Area schools.  

His early classroom experience convinced him there was a pressing need for stories for boys. Children’s lit- there was no YA category until after World War II- was, he thought, sissified, the desiccated husk of the old moral uplift fables of Albert Optic, Horatio Alger, and their ilk in the 19thC. 

One reviewer noted, Pease “was especially struck by the unrealistic value system presented in many children's books. Most stories had the hero become wealthy or the school's winning athlete or fraternity president. Pease felt that a far more realistic view of life was necessary to prepare children for life's experiences. ‘When you begin to get rid of your illusions about life, you are beginning to grow up-to mature into an adult.’" 

Teaching on an island with no night ferry service, Pease finished The Tattooed Man in 1925. American Boy offered him $1000 for serialization rights; then Doubleday, Page & Co contracted the book for publication in early 1926. A London edition soon followed.

With success within reach, Pease used his summer vacations to ship out on tramp steamers to gather more material. He spent 1926-27 teaching writing at Vassar College and turning out another Tod Moran novel, The Jinx Ship, by night; it was published in 1927 and went into multiple international editions.

Pease returned to California, married his second wife, and continued teaching full time and summering on tramp steamers. By 1934, when The Ship Without A Crew, was a Junior Literary Guild selection, Pease decided to give up teaching and write full time. 

The family traveled with a trailer, crisscrossing America for material. Pressured to remain on the profitable Tod Moran treadmill by his editors, Pease shopped a historical work to Dodd, Mead, and with its sale got enough leverage to reduce his Moran output to every other book in 1935.

He was a slow, disciplined writer who chafed under the direction of women editors and publishing executives who dominated the children’s lit beat in publishing. Although his editors' advertised that Pease was a merchant marine (rather than a teacher-writer) most of his sea trips and travels were very consciously and specifically made to gather research notes. He kept strict office hours, beginning work at 8:00 a.m. and writing for six hours daily, revising each chapter at least five times. He spent an average of about ten months on each of his book.

By the 1950s, Pease got so much fan mail from kids he had to resort to replying with standardized, topical brochures. He taught writing at the college level throughout California, always stressing getting published. 

“I never thought of myself as a Hemingway or a Faulkner, I kept to my own little books because I was interested in kids,” he said. But while he may have seen himself as a niche writer, he pushed his readers. In 1946 he praised a Newberry Award runner-up, The Avion My Uncle Flew, for its author’s careful insertion of French words and phrases into the text until readers finally reached an entire page in French and realized they understood it. 

Pease also became a legend- for good and ill- after a 1939 speech some called “a misogynistic rant.” As an invited speaker at an ALA preconference on children’s reading hosted by the Section for Library Work with Children, the author best-known for his high-seas adventure books (popular with boys) delivered what amounted to a misogynistic rant to an audience of four hundred children’s librarians, most of whom were women.

He berated them for creating a children’s book world controlled by women and feminine values. He was especially critical of the books most prized by children’s librarians. “All the models held up today are girls’ books. All the qualities demanded of writers today are feminine qualities—the delicate, the fragile, the beautiful, the poetic, the whimsical, the quaint, the fairylike.”

The last of Tod Moran’s adventures was published in 1961. Having outlived three wives, Pease dropped out of fame, living quietly off his royalties in a San Francisco apartment until his death in 1974. He was buried in Stockton, and left his papers to the University of the Pacific. 

Numerous appreciations of Pease’s work, and calls for its reissue- have been published in the forty-plus years since his passing. He knew his market, and he worked it well. As one 1965 newspaper article put it, “"Howard Pease has undoubtedly had more of his books read by flashlight after bedtime than any other author.”

Curiously, for an author who lived at sea in his mind, Pease's son inscribed his marker, "Author and Teacher, He Opened Up the Skies."